Only a textbook with a complete lack of understanding of what communism was would claim the USSR was a model communist economy, however, they would have been correct in asserting that a centrally planned economy could work in place of a capitalist once. Consider just what the USSR accomplished under Stalinism in terms of development. Between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and WWII, the Soviet Union went from very little in the way of manufacturing, being largely agrarian at that point to one of the major industrial powers of the era. In the post WWII era, the Soviet Union GDP grew at a faster rate than the US did, and they did it without the benefit of wealthy allies to prop them up. This overnight superpower also managed to produce war material at sufficient quantity to if not necessarily keep pace with NATO and allies, kept up with them well enough to pose a serious military threat to everyone. Had they not faced the external pressure from every other wealthy and well established nation on the planet ganging up on them, it is entirely possible the Soviet Union would still be around today.
Yes, they had a lot of agricultural problems, but in fairness, Russia as a whole kind of sucks for growing things. If a centralized economy had arisen in say, the US, where we have enormous amounts of natural resources as well as what is probably the best farmland in the world, a lot of the famine problems likely would have been avoided. Also, it is worth considering just how far technology has come since the advent of data analytics in the information age, a centralized economy would likely be vastly more efficient today than it was during the Soviet Union given how far we've come in modeling and predicting human behavior and the capacity to organize and spread information.
Now, I'm not advocating for that model, I'm not saying it doesn't have significant downsides, I'm not saying it isn't wide open to abuse and corruption and data manipulation, but to simply write off centralized economies because one of them failed would be like writing off democracy and capitalism because South Vietnam fell.